He’s central to DC’s Dark Nights: Metal event — and hopefully the Winged Warrior will soar again. PLUS: 13 of the Greatest Hawkman Covers Ever. Dark Nights: Metal #1 comes out this week (8/16 to be precise) — launching in earnest one of two seismic miniseries DC’s publishing this year, with Doomsday Clock coming this fall. I’ve read the issue and it definitely has wide-ranging implications for the DC Universe. And while Batman and the Justice League are the main players, the central character, in a fashion, is one who’s effectively off-screen the whole time: Hawkman. If you’ve read the two prelude issues, The Forge and The Casting, you know that Carter Hall was investigating the true nature of Nth Metal before disappearing. (I’m not going to even try to figure out how this factors into the recent Death of Hawkman miniseries, let alone the thousand of other profoundly convoluted threads of the Winged Warrior’s backstory.) What happened to Hall, back in his archaeologist persona, is a crucial piece of the Metal puzzle. Now, modern comics being what they are, we know Hawkman will be found, in the appropriately titled tie-in one-shot Hawkman Found, come this December by the all-star team of Jeff Lemire, Bryan Hitch and Kevin Nowlan. But even before that was announced, I was of the mind that big things were in store for Hawkman come 2018. He’s a character with a lengthy, but sometimes maligned history, who needs an A-List creative team to bring him back to the fore, much like Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis revived Aquaman six years ago — a successful relaunch that continues to this day. I expect that’s what we’ll get once Metal wraps. From a macro standpoint, a lot of what Metal is about is reintroducing forgotten or misbegotten DC characters and concepts. Specifically, the publisher is putting a lot of stock in rebuilding Hawkman in a white-hot spotlight, in the hands of its two most popular stars — Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo — and reminding fans just what made him soar. They’re not going to just drop that when this is over. (My hope is Lemire, one of comics’ best writers, will take the reins full-time next year. It’s an excellent pairing of character to creator.) But some fans don’t need to be reminded of how cool...

All by the underappreciated Jim Mooney, who would have been 98. Jim Mooney was the kind of artist that the comics industry was built on. We all know the big names from history but for every Jack Kirby, there were 100 — 1,000? — journeymen and women who also kept things moving. These were artists who in many cases toiled in obscurity because of the way credits were withheld, particularly in cases like Batman where Bob Kane’s name was slapped on every story until the ’60s. Mooney was probably best known for work he did on Supergirl and, later, Spider-Man, but he was assigned to Batman before that — and that’s where we’re going for this 13 COVERS salute. He produced some of the Caped Crusader’s niftiest covers of the Golden Age, in Batman and Detective, as well as a series of snazzy Robin covers over in Star Spangled Comics (including that top one, my all-time fave). Mooney, who was born Aug. 13, 1919, died in 2008 at the age of 88. We salute him. — — Cover images and credits from the stalwart Grand Comics Database....